Wednesday, 23 May 2007

Postcards from Amsterdam - Part 3

After a hard day's work, there is nothing like a nice dinner and some good conversation to help you wind down. We searched out a number of restaurants before settling on Kobe and Sushi where Angie, Oliver, Jason, and myself enjoyed a nice meal.

There was a group of Americans seated at the same table / fry stove, talking loudly about work. It wasn't until Oliver and I started debating about how many worms there are in sushi and if they were harmful or not, that they shut up. I wonder why?

After dinner, we went for yet another walk around town to see the lights before settling in back at the hotel for the night.

This may seem off topic, but jet lag can be a real PITA. In this case, it turned out to be a mixed blessing. I've been reading this book "Light: Science and Magic", which has a lot of really good information about lighting and how do deal with lighting issues. Since I was wide awake, and even though I had an early morning meeting with RAVU (our customer), I decided to try the ulitmate lighting exercise I could think of: shoot the glass and metal sink that was in my hotel room, and some water to the mix!

I didn't notice until later that there were a lot of nicks and scratches, which made for a lot of reflections and refractions with the strobe lights, but it kind of brought the abstraction back down to earth.

I called this one "Keeping Your Head Above Water" because it reminded me of a man in water up to his neck.

Running water made for bubbles, which makes for a very interesting lighting challenge. Here I chose to blow out the background and keep my reflection in the drain stop.

Playing with the two strobes and varying the lighting made for all sorts of abstract compositions.

I took a couple of hundred shots that night (which did tire me out in the end) and boiled them down to a series of shots that I have uploaded to a Flickr slideshow called "Glass, Metal, and Water". The Flickr set for the series is here. For those who are interested, you can look at the comments on the Flickr site to see the lighting set-up and exposure details.

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About Postcards

Much like a tourist would purchase a postcard to document a special place on a trip, I try to capture life moments on a 'postcard' to share with others. These postcards may be from my own life or from someone who wanted me to create their own personal postcards. I hope you enjoy viewing these postcards as much as I did creating them.

To see more of my blog post, click on one of the key words to the right of the page, then use the "Older" and "Newer" links at the bottom of each post.

Many of my images are available as hand-made fine art prints. To see what is available and to buy one, head over to my web gallery here.